Nato members can expect little help from the increasingly diminished occupant
of the White House – so who is going to stop aggression by Putin and the
Islamic State, asks Peter Foster

Barack Obama admits he has no strategy to deal with Isil and will tell the Europeans to spend more to defend their own continentPhoto: EPA

By Peter Foster

6:00AM BST 01 Sep 2014

Even by the standards of the Obama administration, it came as a moment of profound anti-climax. After days of breathless briefings that Barack Obama was preparing with international allies to take the fight to the Islamic State (Isil) jihadists in Syria, the president stepped forward to a White House microphone last Friday to announce that…um… well, that was not exactly true.

Indeed, far from it. “We don’t have a strategy yet,” Mr Obama admitted, puncturing at a stroke those rising expectations, inflated by his own officials, that the US was about to go on the offensive. If anyone was harbouring the impression that, after six years of retrenchment, events on the ground in Iraq were going to force America to re-engage with the world, Mr Obama was at pains to dispel it.

This Thursday, when the president arrives at the Nato summit in Wales – via a stop-off in Estonia to pay lip service to the three Baltic states who have been nervously protesting at Vladimir Putin’s unchecked advances in the Ukraine – Mr Obama will certainly not be rushing to reassure Europe that America is suddenly back as the world’s policeman.

On the contrary, he will point to Europe’s desultory failure to meet the basic Nato spending commitment of 2 per cent of GDP, and the matching lack of political will to confront the threat posed by Mr Putin’s adventurism. Thus will he answer those who have questioned the absence of American leadership in the world.

The truth is that America – both its president and its war-weary public – has little interest in helping those who would not first help themselves. Mr Obama bristles at international complaints about American absenteeism, and much of the US agrees with him.

Despite all the horrors perpetrated by Isil and the plight of the trapped Yazidis, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released last week found that fewer than one in three Americans supported humanitarian aid for Iraq and only one in five approved the use of air strikes to stop Isil.

Of course, the political picture is not that simple. Mr Obama might be in touch with his public opinion, but his personal approval ratings for handling foreign policy are at a Jimmy Carter-like 35 per cent. This speaks to the essential paradox within America’s attitude to its place in the world – a contradiction that Mr Obama has never seemed to fully grasp: Americans don’t want intervention, but nor do they want a weak and indecisive president, as theirs has so frequently seemed of late.

This summer, Mr Obama’s hands-off foreign policy doctrine has unravelled before our very eyes, along with much of what remained of his personal credibility. Not 10 weeks ago, as Isil forces were checked at the gates of Baghdad, Mr Obama was still keeping up his usual sang froid, playing down the threat as “regional”, not existential as many now feel it to be. The jihadists posed “great dangers” to US allies in the Middle East like Jordan, the president said on June 19, but were still only “potentially” a threat to Europe and – even more distantly, he conceded – could “ultimately” pose a danger to the US homeland.

Politicians are always at the mercy of events, particularly when they move as fast as a heavily armed Isil convoy approaching Erbil, but Mr Obama’s denials were rooted in more than poor intelligence. His mischaracterisation of the severity of the Isil threat – which was largely swallowed by an Iraq-loathing American public in June – came because neither party wanted to recognise the scale of their own misjudgment.

Perhaps maintaining a face-saving professorial detachment to the rise of al-Qaeda’s psycho-statelet is to be expected from Mr Obama, but his diminishing status and increasingly distracted appearance (he was out partying until 2am at the society wedding of a White House chef on Saturday) means that the conversation is already turning to who comes next, and what that will mean for US positioning in a very uncertain world. It seems as if anything is up for grabs. Events such as the killing of James Foley on August 20 can rapidly change the political calculus.

After Mr Foley’s beheading had forced the Isil threat into Middle-America’s consciousness, a YouGov poll found that 63 per cent of his countrymen would support strikes against Isil in Syria. That is an almost exact reversal of public opinion a year ago when 62 per cent of Americans said Mr Obama should not order air strikes against the Assad regime, despite accepting that it had gassed nearly 500 children. One dead American, killed in an unspeakably gruesome manner, counts for a lot.

But if the memory of the Foley killing is allowed to fade, so too will any general appetite for the US to do more than just contain the threat; equally, if more Americans were to be beheaded, or a returning Isil jihadists were to commit some terror spectacular in the American homeland, then things would move very rapidly in the opposite direction.

As a president whose star appears to be waning, Mr Obama will have increasingly less influence on the direction America chooses to take. If the Democrats lose the Senate in November’s mid-term elections, Republicans will be in control of both houses of Congress, leaving Mr Obama even more impotent and isolated than at present.

After a decade and a half during which America lurched from George W Bush’s interventionism to Barack Obama’s dogged disengagement, it will be the next American president who will have to decide to what extent to – as Hillary Clinton likes to say – “recalibrate” America’s foreign policy. And as a front-runner, Mrs Clinton has already indicated she would change course.

Despite serving as four years as his first-term secretary of state, Mrs Clinton has made clear that she fundamentally disagrees with Mr Obama’s idea that the first rule of foreign policy is “don’t do stupid stuff”. Instead she advocates what she calls “smart power” – an engagement with the world that walks the line between the Bush and Obama doctrines and reasserts the idea, called into question by Mr Obama’s actions, if not his words, that America is a force for good in the world.

With more than 30 years of experience at the top table of American public life, Mrs Clinton is the presumptive Democrat nominee, but she concedes she is uncertain whether the American public is prepared to sign up to what sounds like an “old-fashioned” view of the world. “I’m about to find out,” she said in a recent interview, “in more ways than one.”

On the Republican side, things are less clear. With a front runner still to emerge, the bench of potential Republican nominees covers the full spectrum when it comes to foreign policy. They range from traditional interventionists such as Florida senator Marco Rubio, who believes America always “pays dearly” when it retreats from the world, to out-and-out isolationists such as Rand Paul, the libertarian senator from Kentucky who attacked Mrs Clinton last week as a “hawk” whose calls to arm moderate Syrian rebels while secretary of state (blocked by Mr Obama) would have dragged the US into another Middle Eastern quaqmire.

Whichever candidates end up fighting for the presidency, the 2016 election promises to be as divisive and rancorous as the last. However, unlike in the 2012 campaign – where foreign policy was largely parked by Mr Obama who just took the plaudits for the Bin Laden raid and the withdrawal from Iraq – foreign policy will be at the heart of discussion.

Britain, as a country that relies heavily on the United States for its position in the world, should be watching carefully, and hoping fervently that the next occupant of the White House manages to “have a strategy” and steers a more prudent course than his or her two predecessors.